So mastodon.social was under a DDoS attack.
@Gargron confirms this.
Someone out there doesn't like the Fediverse.
But also, if they thought that taking down mastodon.social would take down the Fediverse, then they were incredibly foolish!
The Fediverse is built on redundancies.
This isn't like Twitter where a Fail Whale would bring down the entire social network.
I'm on mastodon.social, and it's not working fully for me - notifications and explore feeds loading slow/erratically. But my home feed seems pretty fine, still lots to see and interact with.
From poking around the code a bit, I got the picture that some features are de-prioritised in the event of heavy load, so that more critical features can still function. Pretty sweet.
Chris Trottier
naught101